1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a detecting system, and more particularly, to a system for detecting VOCs, a method for forming the mentioned system, and the utility of the mentioned system.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Today, the majority of typical volatile organic compounds with toxic, explosive, flammable, and environmental hazards have been widely used in the manufacture of various industrial products, and all sorts of chemical experiments. In a variety of industrial products and its research, such as semiconductor, petrochemical, and chemical, volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are often used during production of those industrial products as reagents, solvents, additives, intermediate or final product. For example, VOCs can be used in the development of pharmaceutical, cleaning fluid, oil, and the like. In general, those volatile organic compounds are very dangerous to people and environment, because they are explosive, flammable, and toxic. If VOCs are leaked out, it may bring about serious calamity, such as explosion, fire accident, etc., cause people huge damage on health and wealth, and bring acute problem of environmental pollution. For example, on May 17, 2012, in one chemical plant in Changhua County, Taiwan, Changhua Coastal Industrial Park, there was a huge explosion because of accident during toluene stirring, and the explosion resulted in one death and 13 injuries. In another case, a refinery explosion in Texas city, U.S.A. due to the leakage of volatile organic compounds which caused over 100 people injured and 15 confirmed death. Therefore, it should be extremely careful on the storage tanks, the pipes, and any processing about volatile organic compounds. In addition, if exposed to volatile organic compounds, it is in a high proportion that people will have allergies as asthma, cancer, and other diseases. Therefore, in order to protect human health and the environment, be subject to the harm caused by the leakage of volatile organic compounds or vaporization thereof, it is an extremely important matter to timely and accurately monitor the storage and transport of volatile organic compounds. The detection of toxic compounds is not only to ensure the safety of human health and property, but also to avoid the occurrence of environmental disasters.
The study of detecting VOC began in 1982 by Dodd and Persaud et al. Dodd and Persaud et al demonstrated the concept of electronic noise, based on an electronic apparatus similar to the human nose. The electronic apparatus was able to identify the smell characteristics around different compounds by detecting resistivity, voltage, current, frequency rates of change, and the like. Some methodologies are recently applied to commercial available sensor products, for example, semiconductor sensing method, catalytic combustion method, electrochemical sensing method, infrared sensing method, etc. Most of these sensor products are extremely expensive, for instance, an infrared sensor for sensing the leakage of VOCs costs over 130,000 US dollars. Apparently, the popularization of these sensor products is limited by the expensive cost. Especially, to our best knowledge today, there is still no commercial VOC sensor that can be massively equipped anywhere including each joint between transporting pipes, each switch of storage tanks, or other all high risky regions that VOC may be leaked out.
The common VOCs detecting technology is as the following. One commonly detecting technology is resistive measurement. A resistive measurement is performed by detecting the concentration of known volatile organic compounds via the changes of resistance. But, the lifetime of the detective material of resistive measurement is about 1 year. Another detecting technology is performed by employing detective material as the target detecting substrate. The target detecting substrate can bond with specific detective target, and the variation of the spectrum, such as fluorescent spectrum or Raman spectrum, of the target detecting substrate molecular with the specific detective target is recorded to determine the types and the concentration of organic compounds. The mentioned target detecting substrate is expensive, and the mentioned measurement is complicate and with long time. Still another VOC detecting technology is employing IR (infrared) spectroscopy to determine the type and concentration of organic compounds directly. The IR spectroscopy measurement is not widely used in industry because of the expensive cost, difficult maintenance, sensitive to moisture, and complicate testing sample collection and preparation. Accordingly, the development of a volatile organic compound(s) detecting system is the major target for the current industry development.